Is the article dead?

No, the article's not dead, but "the real question ... whether it remains the primary way people encounter journalism".

If "Personalization is coming to journalism... who controls it", and what sort of journalism will it affect? Most news is not "high-end, high-quality investigations, analysis, and commentary", which will probably not be personalised - but most news "provide actionable answers to practical questions: What did the planning commission decide about that development proposal? When does early voting start? What routes are closed for road work?" - and that is probably useful for readers to be personalised.

So "who is personalizing the article, and how?".

Let's start with How, which starts with discovering each individual reader's needs. Not all the methods are good:

• "third-party tracking, borrowing techniques from targeted advertising networks... violates fundamental privacy principles"
• "inferring needs through their reading activity on our sites... has clearer ethical boundaries... [but] there may not be enough signal", leading to "a catch-22 cold-start problem"
• "let them consensually tell us what they care about... ideologically clean but in practice may be awkward and interruptive"

Today's newsroom CMSs can't really support (2) or (3), so "I don’t think newsrooms should attempt to build or host personalization engines". But the situation changes if "personalization moves from publisher-controlled systems into reader-controlled tools... the article remains universal, but the experience of encountering it becomes personal".

Moreover, it becomes more effective (inferring needs from everything the reader consumes), private (the data stays on the user's machine) and 100% under the user's control.

This could be supported by publishers via "an open standard... semantic signals... describe what different sections of an article are about", although this is not a call for the old semantic web.

If this does not happen, personalisation will happen anyway, but will be "Built around surveillance and intermediaries, it erodes trust and weakens journalism’s public role."